Recently, research and development efforts have been directed to semiconductor memory devices utilizing ferroelectric memory cells in hopes of providing memories which are non-volatile and provide fast access. Examples of such semiconductor devices are described in U.S. Pat. No. 4,873,664 to Eaton, Jr. and in the article Eaton, Jr., et al., "A Ferroelectric DRAM Cell for High Density NVRAMs," ISSCC DIGEST OF TECHNICAL PAPERS, pp. 130-131, February 1988. Conventional examples of such devices, however, have experienced the corruption of data due to unknown causes. The observed failure mode is that data are corrupted when previously written data are inverted as a power supply is turned on which had previously been turned off.